The Tyranny of the Consumer Journey

One of the things I increasingly find myself thinking about is how problematic the ‘consumer journey’ is as a construct in modern marketing. One of my spicier opinions is that the preoccupation of this idealised representation of the messiness of human decision making is at the heart of so many issues that faces media planners today.

I’m not advocating for not attempting to understand how people interact with a particular category or purchase decision, instead I guess I’m challenging the notion the consumer journey is something that needs to be managed or that paid advertising (in all it’s myriad forms) needs to be planned and deployed against every stage of the path to purchase.

So much of debate around media planning’s future, especially at the moment as we move into a world underpinned and powered by AI, seems to focus on the core task being one of ‘management’ of the consumer journey. Primarily, I’m thinking about Google’s enduringly popular Messy Middle research and the more recent White Paper from consultancy Maddison and Wall entitled ‘The Future of Planning is the Platform’ (a report commissioned by Google).

The cynical view might that these ideas represent a relatively unvarnished ploy to scare Marketing Directors and CMOs into spending more money on a wider range of Google’s product set.

Part of my cynicism is driven by the fact that as well as working in media planning, I’m also a consumer of advertising. And whilst my understanding of the machinations of the marketing process might be slightly more sophisticated than someone who doesn’t work in the industry, I’ve never really encountered an instance where a brand has successfully ‘managed’ me through a journey with paid communication. And if they have, then i’ve never really noticed.

Organisations - especially big organisations who are working with very large sums of money - like to think in terms shape and structure. One very sophisticated marketing organisation I’ve worked with started the noble process of trying to codify the journeys of their core customer segments in a number of buying occasions or settings for their portfolio of food brands. Each of the journeys, irrespective of consumer type (young, old, novice, expert) or occassion (quick and convenient, high effort etc) ended with the consumer - flushed with pride - uploading a picture of their finished meal to instagram to share their accomplishments with their friends and social circle.

The messiness, variance and non-linear nature of reality is problematic for the systemic approaches that we render so cleanly and logically in powerpoint.

In marketing terms, it might be appropriate to build assets or product pages that speak to the entire spread of activities across a consumer’s journey. Where paid activity is concerned, the challenge is what might politely be called Strategic dilution. Or, if we’re being less polite, a lack of focus. How many times have you encountered a piece of strategic thinking which includes three boxes: one for the top, for the middle and one for the bottom sections of a customers ‘path’ through even the simplest of journeys. I’ve definitely produced enough of them in my career.

The challenges of fragmentation are real. As our understanding that journeys have become more nuanced in response to the explosion of media touchpoints that consumers now consult during their interaction with categories, fragmenting spend to meet them in all of these various environments seems problematic.

Perhaps a more adequate response would be to find ways of consolidating spend. By placing bigger, more impactful bets into single areas along the customer journey where we believe the biggest commercial opportunity or challenge exists. This intervention may be focussed on moving a specific metric, or perhaps a specific customer action.

In order to do this effectively, we still need to understand - or at least have a model for understanding - how consumers are making decisions about brands and services and where our client’s brands or products excel or are seen as deficient. What most advertisers don’t have though is the luxury of sufficient finances or resource to manage the consumer through there journey.

So much of the narrative around technology seems to point toward more: more stages of a journey, more assets, more quickly.

Good strategic practice however, is rarely, if ever, about more. It’s often actually about less: about resources managed strictly, about fewer options, executed well both in time and over time.